8/24/16

Early on in Carol, an adaptation of Patricia
Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt,
we see Rooney Mara’s character, Therese Belivet, perched in a projection booth
watching Billy Wilder’s classic film noir, Sunset
Boulevard. While Therese’s boyfriend makes hapless advances from behind,
another boy is vigorously taking notes, proclaiming that he’s seen the film six
times, and that he is currently “charting the correlation between what the
characters say and how they really feel.” Perhaps the joke is that Carol plays out mostly through scenes of
smoldering innuendo, but the sight of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond for a
fleeting moment might cue even a casual movie enthusiast to think about Carol through the smoky lens of film
noir.

The
director of Carol, Todd Haynes, has definitely
taken good notes on genre styles of the past, whether he’s experimenting with the
superstar bio-pic via movies about Karen Carpenter, Bob Dylan and the Bowie/Eno
glam-rock era, erecting an homage to the technicolor melodrama’s of Douglas
Sirk in 2002’s Far From Heaven, or
intertwining three genres at once with his first feature length film in 1991, Poison, a poetic commentary on alienation,
punishment, and queer desire that manages to juggle noir horror in the
tradition of Don Siegel or Herk Harvey, a 1980's TV Docu-expose of the Bizarre,
and an Andre Gide prison tale designed in a lavish, theatrical style
reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film, Querelle. The lineage of queer cinema that runs through the work of
Sirk, Fassbinder, and Haynes has reached a strong point of culmination in Carol, which may prove to be Haynes’
most effective film since the rise of the new queer cinema he was such an
essential part of in the early 90’s.

Carol
is punctuated significantly by the shared name of the central character of Haynes’
most acclaimed film from that early period, [Safe],
where Julianne Moore played Carol White, an American housewife suffocated by
aerosol and affluence. Cate Blanchet plays Carol Aird, a wife and mother of the
1950’s whose home environment is similarly suffocating and threatened, but
where Carol White’s character was trapped by the cold, symmetrical architecture
of the suburban 1980’s, Blanchet’s Carol is immaculately trapped by a series of
brooches, gloves, hats, and hairstyles that also mark the difference in social
status between her and her younger lover, Therese.

It was only late in the
film, when Carol and Therese make a somewhat desperate move to seize their
desire for one another in the present, ignoring the consequences of the
inevitable future, the rainy streets and subway grates of the film’s opening
having given way to the dusty parking lot of a remote, Midwestern roadside
motel, that I was reminded of that earlier flash of Norma Desmond, and how
subtly Haynes had transformed Carol
into an unexpected noir. In her influential work on “Women in Film Noir,” Janey
Place defined Desmond as “the most highly stylized ‘spider woman’ in all of
film noir as she weaves a web to trap and finally destroy her young victim, but
even as she visually dominates…she is presented as caught by the same false
value system.” Blanchet’s Carol Aird certainly dominates visually, yet she is
played at a pitch nowhere near the delusional narcissism of Norma Desmond.
Still, how intentionally her web for Therese is woven is ultimately a question
whose answer is as discreet as one of the lover’s initial conversations over a
glass doll case in a department store. Of course, the more important
entanglement to Haynes and Highsmith is one of a false value system in relation
to sexuality, one that treats them like dolls under department store glass.
This is highlighted by Haynes’ persistent presentation of the characters
through rainy car windows, streaked glass, windows and frames, which Place also
writes about as “one of the most common motifs in film noir.” The film’s
circular chronology, along with what Paul Schrader described in his “Notes on Film
Noir” as “an almost Freudian attachment to water” are also utilized in Carol, but the ultimate effect of the
film is not one stuck in the repetition of past styles. And, even though a gun
is introduced in the 3rd Act of the film, the violence of Carol is ultimately not at all physical, but emotional. Haynes
blends these conventions into the film in such a painterly, subdued way that
what we are left with is not just a period homage, but what feels like a new
chapter in progressive, queer cinema.

1/8/16

The production and maintenance of a movie star as
hyper-masculine as Arnold Schwarzenegger must be an arduous ongoing process. If
Terminator Genisys is any indication, the industry that created Schwarzenegger may not be
limited to the mere extinction of the 67-year old action movie mainstay. The
titular, robotic role originated in James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator is probably the most
iconic of Schwarzenegger's career, which now dates back over 45 years to the
schlock of Hercules in New York
(Arthur A. Seidelman, 1969). As a star, Schwarzenegger's career trajectory and
cultural impact are unlike any other. As an actor, if I may, his skills are
severely limited.

I say this with full awareness that it’s a
stereotypical cheap jab at an easy target, but, more importantly, as a somewhat
flabbergasted acknowledgement that this extreme imbalance of masculinity over
ability has been such a longstanding, surmountable factor for movie consumers.
The triumph of the Star, in this case, comes at the expense of Acting.
Schwarzenegger's rise to stardom (ironically crossing paths with the great
actor's director Robert Altman in The
Long Goodbye, 1973), traverses a period of Hollywood filmmaking that
gradually shifted values from one that was actor-oriented to one that was
spectacle-oriented.

For Hercules
in New York the Austrian body-builder-turned-thespian had to have his part
dubbed by a more intelligible actor; an interesting reversal on the appearance
in Terminator Genisys of Australian
bodybuilder Bret Azar, a "body dub" for Schwarzenegger in the film's
attempt to re-contextualize scenes from the original Terminator. Hercules is a similarly suited role for Schwarzenegger,
foreshadowing the type of mythic, repeatable roles through which his Star power
would produce a new brand of right-wing cinema.

In Terminator
Genisys Schwarzenegger continues this long, conservative trek that has
criss-crossed a political career and three Expendables
films, kicking ass to the vicarious delight of aging, small-minded racists and
militants who lived through the simultaneous eras of the Counter-Culture, the
Hollywood Renaissance, and Viet Nam, and still have a bony right arm with which
to pull a voting lever. This entry of the long-exhausted Terminator franchise amplifies this historical aspect of the
conversation by placing the action in San Francisco, the epicenter of the
counter-culture movement, which we eventually see Schwarzenegger's aging
Terminator (Pops) transform into an underground arsenal. The speakers of San
Francisco, once carrying across the sound of revolution, are transformed into
weapons for destroying an even deadlier Terminator, the T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee).
But, the larger enemy is the new Skynet-as-flower-child, Genisys, whose
youthful hologram promises in the idealistic vernacular of a bygone era:
"We will change the world together."

Of course, it's Schwarzenegger's job, once again, to
bash any uprising of change, intellectualism, or youthful idealism. And,
perhaps, the once die-hard angst over the hippies has faded a bit, usurped by
the fear of a technological age that will trojan-horse in via video games, and
the wish of a generation to "Be Sedated," as per the film's Ramones-penned
refrain. In a scene late in the film, in the underground San Francisco arsenal,
the relentless time signature of the Ramones is too much for Pops the Terminator,
as he fails to load his final clips in rhythm with the music or his human rival
of masculinity, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney, in for Michael Biehn). It's here that
Reese reminds Pops of another of the film's refrains, that the Terminator is
"old, but not obsolete." For a movie I had taken as a sometimes
clever genre exercise for at least the first hour, at this point I could only
hope for the obsolescence of the Terminator
franchise.

Beyond the blow that the Schwarzenegger era dealt to
the craft of acting, and the conservative ideology it passed off as heroism
along the way, Terminator Genisys is
perhaps the most degraded example of "post-classical" cinema, as
discussed by Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland in their book Studying Contemporary American Cinema.
Not only defined by the aforementioned value of craft over spectacle, Terminator Genisys is what they would
call a "pastiche of the classical" where "the classical cinema
is merely refigured within the post-classical, neither abandoned or opposed,"
not unlike the refigured metal globs that find their way back to the T-1000.
Yet, pastiche doesn’t quite cover the case of Terminator Genisys, nor any of the multiple post-classical movies
occupying theatres this summer. Like Avengers:
Age of Ultron and Jurassic World before
it, Terminator Genisys continues the
trend of meta-narratives that are not only products of pastiche, but resigned
to a preoccupation with their own terminal nature as product, hopelessly unable
to exist on their own--not only as successful films, but as mere comprehensible narratives—with Schwarzenegger’s flaking
countenance as the latest signifier of this dire trend.

Ultimately, Terminator
Genisys is about Arnold Schwarzenegger as an aging Star, and our
naturalized anxiety about watching our icons of masculinity age. In Richard
Dyer’s book Heavenly Bodies, he
reminds us: “Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary
society,” and that the “individual” represented by the Star is complex in its
construction, as well as its impact on how we construct notions of ourselves
and each other. Terminator Genisys
adds a new binary to the way in which Dyer sees the complex physical body of a
Star like Schwarzenegger, here in his most literally artificial role, made even
more complex by the nature of the indestructible underneath of the Terminator
character, and the potential for endless incarnations of Schwarzenegger as a
marketable commodity well after his death. Where Dyer sees the classical heroes
divided by their “public” and “private” aspects, or their “naturalness” and
“artifice,” Terminator Genisys adds
the post-classical constructs of the Star as “human” or “post-human.” One has
to wonder to what extent we will become naturalized to the distinction between
a “thespian” and a “synthespian” in the movie production, consumption, and
criticism of the future. Perhaps
Schwarzenegger can re-do his past failures like Hercules in New York from beyond the grave? Or, given the recent
share of the cineplex market occupied by the Christian right, maybe he could
experience a second coming in a biblical epic, simply titled: Genesis.

1/5/16

Throughout
the early 2000's, in the era of the post-Leslie Nielsen parody cycle and Fear
Factor, I occasionally watched as Seth MacFarlane's animated Fox series Family Guy sacrificed actual jokes for
shock value, and any semblance of wit for easy pop reference. During that
period, while the Scary Movie and “________” Movie franchises were
launched, the target audience for American comedies was successfully trained
into a Pavlovian response that seemed to hinge on mere pop culture reference. The
joke was dead; or, rather, reduced to the mere mention of Paris Hilton.

Ted 2 begins with the marriage of the
titular bear (voiced by MacFarlane) to his new bride Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth).
The narrative arc of the film involves Ted and his best friend John (Mark
Wahlberg) embarking on a hapless, stoned journey to prove Ted's personhood and
evade the toy manufacturing accusers who want to mass-market sentient Ted
bears. And, there's a budding romance plotline between John and Ted's legal
counsel, Sam L. Jackson (Amanda Seyfried).
Absent of any engaging momentum, the film allows space to ponder the
most important question about MacFarlane's brand of humor: is this a satire?

Somewhere
along their journey, Ted is getting high while watching the iconic Kunte Kinte
whipping scene from the late-70's TV mini-series Roots. In a moment of
epiphany, Ted remarks on Kunte Kinte's struggle as the sounds of the whipping
man are heard in the background: "that's just like me!" This is,
perhaps, the sharpest moment of satire in all of Ted 2, nailing the absurd cries of "reverse-racism" from
certain sectors of the privileged, white, male middle-class. Of course, you
have to read Ted as a white, middle class, Peter Griffin-like male--not a
stuffed, brown bear without a penis--in order to make this reading work. This
may seem like a needless point to make, but hiding behind the thin, protective
walls of anthropomorphic characterizations is one of MacFarlane's favorite
tricks, and I think his audience buys it.

Unfortunately,
for every moment of MacFarlane's truly risky, satirical jabs there are innumerable
examples in Ted 2 that compromise any
chance the film has at having its satirical cake and eating it too. This
manifests itself not only in the way the film wears a fetishized preoccupation
with black bodies and voices on its sleeve, but in the way it transforms that
same fetishizing attitude into a lens for objectifying, eroticizing, and ridiculing
everything it encounters; and, not in a lazy way, but with the near-sociopathic
organization that Ted discovers in John’s pornography files in the film. Again,
Ted 2 is somewhat aware of itself,
and does play at clever, subversive satire, particularly when it comes to
another of MacFarlane's fetish objects, Busby Berekley-era musical numbers,
which we find parodied in the opening credit sequence. There is no punch-line
in this peppy, parodic segment, but rather in the juxtaposition of the Raging Bull-inspired depiction of Ted's
married life that follows, where he and Tammy argue over bills and Ted's lack
of a penis. If it's MacFarlane's mission to call out the false icons of
wholesome, American entertainment (or the American Western with A Million Ways to Die in the West),
marked by his choice to filter his crude comedic voice through that most
American of symbols, the Teddy Bear, then has he succeeded?

Also, did I
mention that the bear doesn't have a penis? The satirical thesis statement of Ted 2 is as follows: "Americans
don't give a shit about anything," which MacFarlane may finally prove to
be true with this film, on a 4th of July opening weekend,
nonetheless. But, the real preoccupation at the heart of Ted 2 is the phallus (make no bones about it). Furthermore, Ted 2 fails as a satire not solely
because much of it is unfunny, but because of timing. For instance, the recent
40th anniversary of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" may put audiences in the mind of thinking about Ted 2 through the lens of "castration
anxiety." In Mulvey's critique (which is no doubt complicated by an
unforeseeable cinema future that produces a sexist, dick-less teddy bear
franchise) Ted 2 reads as a
"complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object,
or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring
rather than dangerous." In a film noir, the fetish object may be a femme
fatale, or in a Busby Berkeley a wholesome young starlet. In Ted 2, MacFarlane draws the world as one
castration anxiety fetish after another, with the film's action culminating in
one of the meccas of masculine anxiety, Comic-Con.

But Ted 2 suffers from bad timing in other ways
that are achingly obvious. Seeing Ted 2
only days after the racism-fueled acts of violence in Charleston and the
subsequent debates about recognizing the Confederate flag, and the further
racist arson of multiple black churches in the South, MacFarlane’s glibly “post-racist”
humor is not only embarrassing, but carries a feeling of fueling those fires.It doesn't take film theory to
understand that the other people in the theatre aren't laughing at MacFarlane's
clever satirizing of white, male
supremacy, sexism and homophobia. They're laughing at the racism, sexism, and homophobia; at the fetishized black man,
which now carries for them the same consequence of laughing at a reference to Paris
Hilton, or ISIS, or selfie sticks.

1/4/16

Inside
Out
did big business this summer alongside a handful of 40th anniversary
re-releases of the progenitor of the modern blockbuster, Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Without getting too much into the
oft-narrated shifts that the movie industry underwent in the mid-70's (relevant
as it might be) it seems useful to reflect on the films that populated the top
ten from the “Year of Jaws” in
contrast to this summer’s top grossers: Jurassic
World, Fast and Furious 7, Pitch Perfect 2, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fifty
Shades of Grey, and Cinderella.
In other words, this summer brought new meaning to the metaphor of cinema-as-fast
food. If you don't see the similarities between the latest recombinant Taco
Bell item and the nutritional/cultural value of Fast and Furious 7, then you really aren't paying attention.

In contrast, the box office frontrunners
accompanying Jaws forty years ago
include the likes of Hal Ashby's Shampoo,
Milos Foreman's adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Needless to say, these films have a challenging
complexity that has endured across the intervening decades, and a maturity that
is only magnified when put in relief to the listless screenwriting and
relentless marketing of films like Jurassic
World.

To gaze at the list of films leading the box office
so far in 2015 is to see the reflection of a culture with developmental problems.
Of course, American culture and media has had numerous occasions to flaunt its
truly immature nature recently, dangerously so. Those who have followed the childish,
anti-intellectual responses to everything from the Caitlyn Jenner story to the
denials of racism in the Charleston church shootings are possibly coming to
similar conclusions recently: that American culture has not only failed to
learn from the past, but to simply grow
up. In part, the cinema is the place
where those attitudes are incubated and debated, where we deepen our emotional
connection to each other; not unlike how Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) ultimately
develops deeper emotional capacities and wider personal constructs through the
narrative arc of Pixar’s Inside Out.

So, what to say of the films dominating the Box
Office this year? At least half of it is built from young-adult or children's
sources, while the more adult-oriented fare would be hard to make a case for actually
having been made with adults in mind. Inside Out is somewhere in the middle of
this current top ten, and maybe one of the most intelligent and artful of the
bunch. The structure of Inside Out is
an exercise in cross-cut action between the inner, psychological world of
11-year old Riley, and her less-colorful, increasingly troubled external
journey as an only child having to move from Minnesota to San Francisco. The
design of Inside Out is essential to
establishing these two separate worlds, at first creating entertaining juxtapositions,
but eventually making more elaborate assertions about consciousness, memory,
and the nature of the Self more commonly found in the realms of philosophy or
neuroscience.

By film’s end, I found the questions raised by Inside Out to be quite engaging, even though
enduring the more maudlin aspects of the movie threaten to overwhelm all this
by the final reel. The hilarious outro sequence takes us through various
depictions of the inner-pilots of minor characters, ultimately landing us
inside the mind of a cat. At this point, questioning the problematic though
common assumption of a tiny character (or characters) controlling consciousness
from behind the third eye (if so, who pilots their consciousness?), this “cat-based”
paradigm opened up a whole new imagistic world that jived more with my
understanding of the chaotic, mysterious, and pluralistic nature of
consciousness, while simultaneously providing the biggest laugh in an already
pretty funny film. In any case, the discussions evoked by Inside Out will likely be what sets it apart from a surfeit of young-adult
fare, and what distinguishes it from the current trends in mainstream movie
consumption that endlessly reward disproportionate preoccupations with
nostalgia over any engagement with the world on the other side of the screen.

In this way, Inside
Out is the most hopeful of the aforementioned commercial frontrunners. Beyond
that, it’s a film that elaborates on the idea of meta-cognition--that is, it
offers a way to think about how we think--that seems a novel idea in the world
of animated movies, though right in line with the more sophisticated of Pixar
films, which present everything from eloquent examinations of criticism (Ratatouille) to questions of post-Earth
post-humanism (Wall-E). In fact, I
imagine Inside Out will be the only
animated film--possibly the only mainstream film--to reference Inductive
Reasoning, Critical Thinking, and the traditions of Abstract Art I’m likely to
see all year. Warning: Adult themes.

"The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real. Short of closing one's eyes - in cinema, a difficult and unprecedented act - there is no defense against it."
--Amos Vogel, "Film as a Subversive Art"